Groundbreaking archives track civil rights movement in St. Augustine

The dining hall of Flagler College offers a dramatic backdrop and a historical note for students (from left) Andrew Kustodowicz, Lyndsey Nauman, Emily Gleeson and Sarah Williamson, who worked on a multi-media archive project documenting the St. Augustine Civil Rights Movement. All four are continuing with the project this year. In 1964 the dining hall was part of the Hotel Ponce de Leon and more than 100 students from all-black Richard J. Murray High School marched into downtown St. Augustine and held a sit-in in the dining room. They were arrested.

Flagler College senior Andrew Kustodowicz remembers his “first real accomplishment” while working on an archive documenting the St. Augustine Civil Rights Movement.

It was finding a questionnaire given out by the St. George Pharmacy to lunchroom customers and among the questions was: “If we integrate, will you continue to eat here?” The year was 1964 and St. Augustine was in the midst of a radical change.

That questionnaire is included in an Internet-based multimedia archive offering a database of materials, interviews and timelines dealing with the Civil Rights Movement in St. Augustine. The archive was created to save documents and memories of the time.

Kustodowicz discovered the questionnaire while looking through thousands of documents including reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Interviewing and camera work weren’t for him; diving through documents was.

“I looked through documents. That’s what I did,” he said of his work on the ongoing interdisciplinary project.

Professional documentarian CB Hackworth, who is overseeing the project that includes several other professors, called the find “my favorite piece.” While there are more historically significant documents in the collection, Hackworth loves the piece because “it is so real … it’s what real people would have done in the circumstances.”

On Sept. 18 the work of students from history, public history, sociology, communication and design disciplines will be unveiled during a special ceremony in the dining hall of what was the Hotel Ponce de Leon and is now Flagler College. The dining hall was the site of a sit-in in 1964.

Hackworth says this is the first interdisciplinary project Flagler has conducted, with about 20 students being accepted each semester to work as a team. The project began in the fall of last year; any student can apply but not all get in.

“Traditionally they’re segmented into disciplines,” he said, adding the group received cooperation from sources ranging from St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar to the St. Augustine Historical Society to the University of Florida.

Some of the material is historical — an audio of a visit by baseball player Jackie Robinson to St. Augustine, thousands of pages of FBI reports to Director J. Edgar Hoover, the fingerprint card of Martin Luther King Jr. made when he was arrested. Some items are more up-to-date including recent video interviews with people who were in St. Augustine at the time.

Seed for the project came from archival footage donated by The Andrew Young Foundation from the documentary “Crossing in St. Augustine.” Young, a civil rights leader and former U.N. ambassador, conducted interviews with St. Augustine residents about the 1964 civil rights demonstration. He took part in the demonstrations.

Hackworth, a documentarian and former journalist who has won 21 Emmy awards for his television work, worked with Young on “Crossing.”

“There were so many good interviews, most of which were not in the documentary,” Hackworth said. The archive will offer all of those interviews as well as new ones conducted by the students plus FBI files, federal court transcripts and accounts written by the late Stetson Kennedy under a pseudonym for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper in Pittsburgh, before the national press came.

“I think that his reporting is some of the most valuable material we’ve come across,” he said.

But students have added their mark leading the project, offering up new ideas, contacting and interviewing residents, developing databases, designing the look of the site and putting it online where it is open to everyone with access to a computer.

“People are going to be surprised by how rich it is,” Hackworth said.

The project is continuing. Interviews remain important since 50 years have passed and the number of people who remember the time are dwindling.

“White people are more reluctant; they’re concerned how they’ll be portrayed,” he said, adding the project is to preserve history and that has made some people more willing to talk.

“By and large I stressed to the students to approach this objectively and not look it as a good guy-bad guy situation, although there were some bad guys. (I told them) to try and view it as another time and people can draw whatever conclusions they want to. Our goal is to present objective material and try to put it in a context they will understand.”

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Okay, there was discrimination in 1964 St. Augustine. And no doubt, these Flagler students think they are doing God's work by rehashing the obvious. But as the leftist financier, George Soros advised, "move on".

How about highlighting that 1964 St. Augustine also produced plenty of successful blacks who haven't spent their life being victimized or traumatized by discrimination. I've been experiencing discrimination my entire life, ( I'm not black ).

Contributing to the monotonous narrative of victimization might get you a job working at msnbc or the naacp, but most of us who grew up in those days don't consider discrimination and prejudice as a defining part of their lives.

Jews, Ukranians, Azerbaijanis, Poles, etc. etc. were enslaved and murdered in much greater numbers than American blacks. But instead of giving lip service with "we shall overcome" they actually overcame, survived and prospered. But they don't live in the past, they're busy living.